


Only Hope

by Davechicken



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:48:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8425930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davechicken/pseuds/Davechicken
Summary: As the Falcon flies away, Leia muses.





	

Leia watches the familiar shape lift up and out of her life, but it doesn’t feel like it should do. The hull has changed over the years: a few more scars, a few more scuffs. A satellite dish changed, a new fuel line there. It doesn’t matter how many alterations the _Falcon_ goes through, she’s still the same ship that saved her ass more times than she can count.

Saved many asses. Saved most of the galaxy, asses or not, with the help of a few others. But it’s this one that felt like home, once she’d lost her first. Alderaan in pieces, and a smuggler with a smugger grin, and a groaning wall of fur and a brother she’d never known had conspired to take her away from death and a father she _did not want to know_.

Not then.

Though after, she’d wondered. Wondered how it would have gone if he had known she was her mother’s - both her mothers’ - daughter. Political, fierce, strong. Wondered if she’d have been able to talk to the man who had been Anakin Skywalker, been able to pull him back around. 

How many times had she been stuck thinking about how things could have been different, if she’d known who that man in the black mask was? Would Alderaan still stand? Or was it only Luke who could…

The _Falcon_ flies away, off to beg for Luke’s return. She’s tried so very hard all these years to keep things going, to keep the torch burning, but things are slipping out of her fingers and she just…

She’s tired. So very tired. Every day it seems another name is etched into the annals. Another brave soul - so many younger than her - lost to the battle against the Darkness. A battle she knows too well, because it courses through her, and always has. 

It was there when she gave the Empire the wrong planet, and condemned her own to death. It was there in the way she’d have shot every last one of them, if she could have, just to save her home. It was there in the fights she’d had with Han over the years, when she couldn’t just love soft and sweet like she was supposed to. It was there in the anger and the blasterfire and the desperate need to win. 

It was there in her baby. The one she’d hoped might…

He’d taken her hellfire and he’d run with it. Run from her, in a need to be free. She hadn’t given him the home she’d had: tossed from base to base, pulled around and never really given time. She’d said to herself that their extended family of pilots and politicians and friends were there to support him, but…

It hadn’t been enough, had it? Not enough to keep him at home, but how could she ever expect him to stay when she didn’t, herself?

Ben. She’d failed him. She’d wanted to be the mother she remembered - both mothers she remembered - but instead she’d let the Darkness win out of her own stubborn, terrified self. She’d let Han’s anxiety bleed through, and she hadn’t kept the monsters from under Ben’s bed.

Now she couldn’t even pay the price. She’d sent Han - Han who never went to a fight unless you pricked at him first - to rescue their son. She should have gone herself. She _should have gone herself_. 

The Resistance didn’t need her as much as she liked to hope it did, or as much as it thought it did. They needed Luke, not Leia. And Ben needed her, but she’d sent Han in her place and now… 

Now she has no one.

She doesn’t know how she can face him, not now. It’s her fault he fell. It’s her fault Han is gone.

She hopes Luke comes soon. 

She’s just not what the galaxy needs.

He’s their only hope.


End file.
